A Pedal Based Speed Control (PBSC) system controls the speed of a vehicle according to the position of a foot pedal or other vehicle lever or actuator. In a PBSC system, a microprocessor identifies a reference speed corresponding to the pedal position and then adjusts the vehicle travel speed to correspond to the identified reference speed.
The PBSC system is different from conventional accelerator based systems where an accelerator pedal is connected directly to the throttle of an engine. With conventional accelerator based systems, an operator presses down or lifts up on the accelerator pedal to control engine acceleration or deceleration (torque). While the vehicle speed may not change instantaneously, the vehicle engine still appears to the operator as responding immediately to changes in the accelerator pedal position.
In PBSC systems there are time gaps between a change in the foot pedal position and a change in the vehicle travel speed. This delay can be caused by multiple different factors. For example, delays in the vehicle travel speed may be attributable to engine response delay, mechanical/electro-hydrostatic actuator delay, filtering delay, discrete control delay, and/or communication delay. These time gaps seriously reduce the stability of PBSC systems and restrict the tuning scope of feedback gains, and therefore results in poor speed tracking performance.